Swing Time

I am so sick of reading books where in the end you just don't care about any of the people in them. That seems to be a dominant theme in a lot of these Booker Prize listed books. I have now read a number of them and I can say Swing Time mirrors the others. A plot that never really goes anywhere, and unlikeable characters' stories woven in chapters in different times. For some reason this story kept me plodding through but with little satisfaction in the end. One person mentioned that we didn't even learn the heroine's name. That was purposeful on Smith's part, I am sure, as she never became anyone, never broke out of her bubble, was only defined by her roles with others. Sad and unrewarding in the end.

Swing Time by Zadie SmithSwing Time, a multifaceted story of two biracial girls growing up in significantly different homes who become inseparable friends but face divergent destinies.Tracey and the Narrator (unnamed) meet in 1982 as they are both signing up for a ballet class at a church in a working-class section of London. Both are mixed race with the narrator having a black intellectual ambitious mother (of Caribbean descent) while her white father who is nurturing but less ambition. Tracey’s mother, on the other hand is white, ignorant, indulgent and unattractive and her criminal father spends most of his time in jail leaving Tracey morally directionless. Tracey has the talent and ends up on stage with a dancing career while the narrator begins work as a personal assistant to an Australian Madonna-like pop star named Aimee. Aimee decides to build a school for girls in West Africa and the narrator takes on the complicated dynamics of working in a country entrenched in poverty and old beliefs taking assignments from a unstable boss. She reports, "I scheduled abortions, hired dog walkers, ordered flowers, wrote Mother's Day cards, applied creams, administered injections, squeezed spots, and wiped very occasional break-up tears.". The story begins in 2008 as the narrator is reeling from the embarrassment of being fired and then moves back and forth in time and location from London to New York to West Africa. The chapters headings are numbered but not identified as to time or location and so it takes a minute to figure out the location and time frame. It is written from the first-person narrative making the identification of who is speaking easier to determine. Some of the characters, although central to the story, seemed to be not fully realized. Intelligently written and researched. 4 stars

The story gets off to a good start with a touching description of a developing friendship between two young girls. Their school, their dancing classes, their friends, their families and all the relative problems, pleasures, contrasts, shared intimacies, rivalries are well handled and hold the reader's attention. But that is lost when the protagonist meets up with her employer, world famous singer and dancer Aimee. This character just does not ring true and, perhaps as a result, the story loses its interest and credibility and becomes shallow and unconvincing. One is tempted to skip pages in the hope of finding the vivacity and spontaneity that characterized the opening pages but is disappointed in the end.

Zadie Smith's Swing Time is as close to a perfect novel as I have heard.I chose my words carefully.Having read (and subsequently worshiped) her essay *Fail Better*, I am using her own term of perfection. The sort of perfection which makes you feel the book and know the author better than any non-fiction ever could. Swing Time presents Smith's truth. It approaches the sort of narrative perfection that makes the book realer than reality. What I mean is, it expresses reality in ways that nonfiction can only present it.It's just brilliant. At times, while reading her novel and finishing my own, I was inspiring. At other times, it was a downright daunting experience. Reading Smith as a writer, you must confront the fact (reading her essay on writing novels helps) that attempting perfection and failing is a worthwhile endeavor. At the very least, it ensures you don't sleepwalk through life.Let me elaborate on why this novel is so good. I was repeatedly struck with the notion: Why doesn't she end it here? There are so many threads, woven tightly, that I thought it could have ended in at least six different points and been a complete work and a joy to get through. Then, in the next chapter, Smith shows off, unveiling the loose ends she hid within each stitch, the ones that you didn't know were there because they were buried in the manifold layers of her personality. Ones that, I like to imagine, she discovered as she wrote her identity through the story.Here is one of those moments when I thought the book may as well have ended. Our narrator has settled down with a bourgeois man. She attends a play that Americanizes the Africans. Leaves them completely threadbare as stock characters, by-products of the racial narrative. When the narrator mentions this at intermission, she is scoffed at. Then, when the play's conclusion reveals the meta-knowledge that the characters were in fact caricatures, the crowd goes wild and deems it brilliant--having never been in on the joke until the reveal. It's a moment like this when the racial arc feels complete. Beginning with the prologue involving the Fred Astaire black-face dance routine, the novel feels like it has come full circle. You think you are in the audience of a grand reveal. Then she goes on, enticing you once more to examine yourself as you read her because you must have missed something else that needs closure. She makes you feel like that audience did at that play. And it’s right to. Anyone who hasn’t had Smith’s exact experience should feel like an ogler, reaching for meaning, searching restlessly for fulfillment of themselves and the book. It’s those things we always feel, but never express, that makes Smith’s work near perfection the way it does.Smith brings the reader to our knees and forces our admission that identity can never be a tangible whole, can never be discovered or explained, as she freely admits in her essays on craft, perfectly.

Unnamed narrator, a brown girl growing up in Brent, gets the dream job working as a general factotum for an international rock star called Aimee who is really Madonna wearing a Kylie mask.The story dips back and forth in our narrator's life. There was a friendly childhood rivalry with Tracey - who lived fun the flats on the wrong side of the road. There was the job working for a youth TV company. There was the mother's political career as she became MP for Brent West. There were romances. The really constant line, though, is Aimee. This is a good insight into the world of the super-rich; the superstars with retinues, with diaries chock-full of trivia, with a quest for new challenges when everything has already been achieved. So we follow our narrator, following Aimee to The Gambia where the plan is to set up a school for girls. Aimee has the big idea, her retinue have to make it happen. It is a classic case of imposing western values on a developing country; the school is not what the community needs but, by God, it is what they are going to get.But the Gambian line starts to get bogged down with personal relationships. As the Aimee party all seem to hook up with Gambians, it gets mighty dull. Do I care that A fancies B and B fancies C? I think not.And the Tracey line is also interesting, although it is not quite clear how friendly rivalry in teenage became hostility in adulthood. Tracey is a dancer and pursues her dream. Our narrator doesn't really have a dream but pursues it anyway. There was supposed to be a significant moment, but when it is revealed it carries too much weight.There is enough in the book to make the reader smile. There is pop culture, satire, race, class, politics. But there is also this saggy, baggy middle that goes on way too long and allows the interest to wane. I didn't buy the ending at all - which required our narrator to become a disgruntled employee and for her employer to discover that fact. Both these premises were implausible. But at least it brought a long novel to a somewhat belated end.This sounds negative, but on balance the good did outweigh the bad. But if only there had been a stronger editor...

I’ve read all of Zadie Smiths’s novels and decided to read Swing Time with some trepidation because, as usual, her works seem to divide reviewers between those who think that she is a literary genius and those who think that she is an overrated luvvie. To date I have fallen between the two: a great essayist but middle-range novelist. White Teeth was an impressive but cluttered first novel, The Autograph Man a dud, On Beauty a slight improvement and then NW, on home ground for the author but written in a jerky experimental style that probably alienated her from the very people she almost condescendingly believed that she was writing about.In Swing Time, as she had done with White Teeth a worryingly long time ago, she has tried to include everything but the kitchen sink, every concern about race, class, gender and age, as well as ambivalence or disquiet about globalisation, celebrity, technology, politics, nostalgia, human motives and the depths of friendship. In her previous novels I felt a certain coldness and detachment, even in – perhaps especially in – NW, her own favourite. But I guess that is just my personal feeling (like how I am moved by the singing of Jennifer Hudson but nauseated by Celine Dion!), but this feeling troubled me as the milieu – multicultural, working-class London – is mine and I wanted to hear someone who spoke to me in a way that I could relate to, something I’m still kind of waiting for, though an indie novel I read a couple of years back came close.Maybe because Swing Time movingly puts our little lives into perspective within the greater scheme of things while acknowledging that our little lives are all we have, this time Zadie has got it right. The blurb, reviews and publicity have made this work familiar before anyone reads it and hardly worth summarising except that it is, unsurprisingly, about two ‘brown’ girls brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in a drab inner London suburb, one intelligent but tortured by self-doubt, the other vivacious and talented but unruly, and how life pans out for them. Understanding these personality differences, their home and familial circumstances, and the emotional tension between the two in their early years is fundamental to understanding the book overall, even during the years they are apart and living in unlike worlds. There were a few occasions in the African sections when I feared that things were about to become a bit preachy or cloying but the author deftly managed to remain even-handed every time. It was all so impressive. I just felt that this was what I had been waiting for from Zadie. The thing is I have experienced many of the narrator’s internalised feelings, but I wish I could write like that!Is she one of the world’s great novelists? Now – in my opinion – yes, but there are not many of them.

Zadie Smith writes interesting books with awkward to like characters. I enjoyed the description of london during the childhood of the main characters because I recognised the atmosphere and references from my own. I found the connection to Amy irritating because the main character didn't seem to listen, learn or evolve and instead spent the duration of the book treading water working in this sterile environment and not seeming aware of the world beyond her narrow needs. I think that this was the point, Paul Auster-style, to write about the human condition rather than the individual, but it feels like an intellectual process that produces cold sterile characters

I had liked one of ZS’s previous novels, so I decided to read this one, but I still don’t really understand it. The narrator doesn’t really evolve into a properly developed character, and what is shown of her is not really believable as a real character. And most of the other characters are not developed at all, but occupy too much space in the novel. As a reader I didn’t feel any connection with any of the them. I just didn’t get ZS’s point, really.

I really liked this book, which follows a fairly typical 21st century careerist from a difficult adolescence into a job, which she was fortunate to obtain but never seems to really appreciate, working for a Madonna look-alike. I think that this is why I dropped off one star, which may be irrational. The main character was simply too frustrating! The author paints a vivid picture of suburban London and also parts of Africa and the story does a great deal of time hopping between different periods of the life of the main character. However I was left with a disappointment that the potential of the plot was never fully realised. Nevertheless as a Zadie Smith fan I would never consider not reading it!

Zadie Smith is brilliant --utterly brilliant. Her writing is wry and intelligent. Smith can do things with language and style and form that I have yet to see other novelists do. She has an ear for dialogue and an eye for scene. 'Swing Time' is one of the most visual novels I have read. Smith captures aesthetics wonderfully and renders London so vividly in this text.The novel centers around the relationship between our unnamed narrator and Tracey, her childhood best friend. The plot is nonlinear and travels between the narrator's coming of age in London and her adult life working as a PA to the famous popstar Aimee (who is perhaps a thinly veiled Madonna?). Along the way, Smith uses her characters and story to make poignant commentaries on a plethora of subjects: motherhood; race, generally, and Blackness in its multitudes, specifically; socioeconomic class, aspirations, dreams, and notions of success; global hierarchies of nations and the fiction of development; envy. The novel is so encompassing, that there are many, many more. And Smith tackles these subjects deftly, with ease. Having not read her fiction before (only her essays), I feared that her commentaries on race would be restricted to a sort of "tragic mulatto" type of analysis. Thankfully, I was wrong.Smith's characters are caricatures, but it strangely works. They are both wildly absurd and utterly sincere, grotesque yet appealing.However, the novel offers little in the way of plot and character development. The characters in 'Swing Time' are fascinating and layered but not known unto us readers. From the novel's opening, it is clear that the narrator will maintain a distance of sorts from the reader. While 'Swing Time' is the narrator's life story-- written in the first person no less--the narrator is unnamed and opens her story by saying that she has experienced herself as a mere shadow of others. As the novel develops, this rings absolutely true.Yet, intimacy between characters and a reader is vital. Nearly all of the characters--and the narrator's mother perhaps comes closest to contradicting this but not quite--lack intimate characteristics. We know very much of their histories, of their thoughts, of their aspirations and failures, but we know very little about their hearts. We know not whether they have loved, whether they have grieved, what fills them with joy, and what fills them with sorrow. They lack an emotional dimension that leaves them less fulfilling than they ought to be. Take Tracey for instance. She deserved much more space for the readers to get to know her on her own terms. We only come to know Tracey through the narrator. In this way Tracey is often hysterical, sometimes a friend, but mostly a mean, vindictive foe. However, Tracey is at the center of the narrator's world, and she rings hollow for a character of such importance.Finally, 'Swing Time' is far too long of a text. Part One has perfect pacing, but as the novel continues through the many chapters of Parts Two through Seven, it easily loses its reader's attention. I started and finished six or seven other books while finishing this one. There are no parts of it that read as unnecessary fillers, but I think it could have been cut by a third to a half.I do, however, strongly recommend 'Swing Time.' It's just brilliant and wonderful, though it requires a very patient and very attentive reader. As soon as I finished, I decided that I must re-read it. I get the sense that this book--and the reading experience of it--is better the second time around.

I doubt that I can say anything that hasn't already been said about this book. The cover and inside flaps are, after all, covered with praise from all sorts of newspapers and literary people.The novel tells the stories of two girls: our unnamed protagonist from whose viewpoint the whole tale is told, and Tracey, her childhood friend whom she meets at a dance class in 1982. Our narrator and Tracey are both mixed-raced, the protagonist having a white, working-class postman for a father, and a Jamaican, self-improving intellectual for a mother. When the protagonist joins the entourage of the pop star Aimee, she beings a 'shadow' jet-set lifestyle. Parts of the book take place in London, others New York, and still more in The Gambia. (Smith never tells us explicitly that the West African country is The Gambia, but mentions of currencies and capital cities allow us to fill in the gaps.)I enjoyed the book greatly. I'm not normally a lover of fiction, but since this was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017, I thought I would give it a go. The book explores the narrator's search for a sense of belonging, something which Tracey seems to find wherever she goes, and something I think most readers will be able to sympathise with on some level or another. I myself saw some parallels between her life and my own.I would heartily recommend this book to anyone.

Not as good as I had hoped. This had some interesting sections and was quite a good consideration of female friendships and rivalries. Zadie Smith writes well but I didn't care much about the characters.

Really enjoyed this book. It captures modern day girlhood sensitively and very well and these young girls their dreams of fame and the reality of striving for these dreams. Their relationship with popular culture was reminiscent of my own. Zadie’s portrayal of black Women have improved significantly I must add. Whilst the novel dragged in places, it really could have been shorter, nevertheless it was a very enjoyable read. Loved it.

Enjoyed this but not as much I've enjoyed other books of Zadie's. This is the story of two very flawed characters and they are typically not easy for us to enjoy or root for, but the writer gave us enough to care about them and to make them matter to us. I think she was quite masterful in how to she went back in time then to the present. The plot itself was not the most riveting but because of her narrative style, I found myself hooked and couldn't wait to get back to the book after I'd put it down to get on with 'life.'I enjoyed yet another Zadie story!

The part of the story about the relationship between the two girls is vaguely interesting (but much better done by eg. Elena Ferrante). The storyline that covers the popstar and Africa - what's that about?!

I wanted to finish this book and read it quickly but it left me disappointed in the end. There was much promise but frustratingly important events were only hinted at, there was much for the reader to fill in themselves or green from the subtleties of the plot. Personally I prefer more explicit plots and less rambling. The main characters were engaging although not exactly likeable. I really liked the younger years and the images of the 80/90s. I feel these were written with more passion and clarity, the book for me fizzled our in the end.

A good read, liked the relationship between the two main characters as they were growing up. Think we could all relate to how friends when we are young can shape us as adults.Got abit dense in the middle of the book but then picked IUp pace towards the end. Have read some of her books before, grew up where she basis most of her books so have a fondness to all the references.

The majority of my family has an affinity for the works of Zadie Smith. The physical product is what one would desire for a paperback book. Fairly proportioned, with a pleasant design. The contents are enrapturing. Smith is possibly the best British writer on class since Forster, though I've been informed that on race she sometimes leans into hackneyed portrayals to sate her readership.

Such a detailed, wide-ranging story took me a little time to get involved with, but even so, after a few pages I was completely hooked on the narrator's childhood friendship with Tracey. The main characters were vividly drawn and utterly believable, and so was the narrative. It's a meditation on how life can take you in directions you never chose, and land you in situations you never imagined and may not even like. I found it strangely comforting: I too grew up with little sense of my place in life, and many years later I'm still bewildered as to how I landed where I am now. I really want to know what happened next.